THE MILL

Trion, Georgia · Since 1845

Our chambray is woven at Trion, Georgia, on the same bend of the Chattooga River where three men dammed the water and started a mill in 1845 — sixteen years before the Civil War, and long enough ago that the town grew up around the mill and took its name from the men who built it.

A trio on the Chattooga, 1845

In 1843 Judge Spencer Marsh and his son-in-law Andrew Allgood went looking for water power in the Georgia hills. They found it in Chattooga County, on land owned by a man named Jim Penn who liked the price of $6,000 but did not care for paper money. Marsh collected silver coins on trips to Augusta, Savannah and Charleston and — as the story goes — closed the purchase with several bags of dimes.

On 12 October 1845 Marsh, Allgood and Colonel W. K. Briers formed a partnership with $25,000 to make products from cotton. They threw a plank dam across the river and put up a two-story building 113 feet by 50, stone below and logs above. Forty people worked six hundred spindles, and the yarn went out in five-pound hanks on wagons to merchants in the surrounding country.

In 1850 the post office was named Trion Factory — Trion, for the trio who founded it. The name stuck to the town and has never left.

Sherman passed it by

The mill wove coarse woolens for the Confederacy under contract, and the Georgia legislature incorporated the town around it in December 1862, with the factory buildings as the center and the limits drawn one mile in every direction.

In October 1864 Sherman's army came through and the mill was not burned. Allgood gave his own account of it under oath five years later: “When General Sherman passed our place in October, 1864 he stayed all night with me and the next morning gave me protection papers. General O. O. Howard sent a large guard to the factory to protect all the property there.” Almost nothing else in the path of that march survived.

Burned to the ground, rebuilt in six months

On 10 April 1875 the mill caught fire and burned flat. Thirty years of building had taken it to five stories, six thousand spindles, two hundred and fifteen looms and three hundred and fifty people. The loss was $150,000. It was insured for $30,000; Allgood did not believe in insurance companies.

The day the fire was still smoking he took the men he trusted into the surrounding woods and began marking the trees he wanted felled for beams in the new mill. Twelve miles away in Lafayette, Marsh watched the smoke and vowed that no one would go without work on account of it — and paid every employee of the old mill through the whole of the rebuild. Trion Manufacturing Company was formed on 4 May. In under six months the brick had been made, the timber cut, the machinery hauled from Rome and the mill was running again.

The Riegel years

By 1901 the mill ran 50,016 spindles and 422 looms and employed 1,200 people — the fourth largest in Georgia. By 1912 it was in bankruptcy, and a 34-year-old New Yorker named Benjamin D. Riegel drove into town in a horseless carriage and bought it.

What followed was the mill's largest period of growth, and the town's. Streets were paved and houses built. A dairy was started so the children of Trion could have fresh milk, and a hospital, a school, a department store, a library, a gymnasium, a pool and a theater followed. Through the Great Depression the mill ran at least two days a week when plants elsewhere shut indefinitely — a decision Riegel made, by his employees' account, with his heart rather than his ledger.

In 1943 the mill and its people were given the Army-Navy “E” Award. Over the war it wove some fifty million yards of herringbone for fighting uniforms, four million yards of tent twill, and cloth for gun patches by the mile.

The turn to denim, 1971

For almost a hundred and thirty years Trion wove greige goods — cloth in its natural, undyed state. In 1971 the mill installed indigo dye ranges and sanforizers and, on 20 April, the first loom began to weave blue. By 1976 there were eleven hundred looms weaving denim.

The shuttles went out in 1978. By 1992 a Swiss loom builder was publishing the mill under the heading Mount Vernon Trion, Georgia: The World's Largest Projectile Weaving Mill, and quoting the man who ran it: “The best people and the best machinery make the best fabric. We control everything right here. Yarn, fabric and finishing are all within minutes of my office.”

That is the same discipline our chambray is woven under. A yarn-dyed cloth is decided at the dyeing of the yarn, long before the loom — which is why it matters that the yarn, the weaving and the finishing all sit inside one gate.

Mount Vernon, 1985

R. B. Pamplin had served on the board of Mount Vernon Mills, bought the company after retiring, and in 1985 acquired Riegel as well — Trion with it. Benjamin Riegel's daughter held the largest block of stock and had better offers on the table. She sold to Pamplin because she believed he would look after the employees and the towns they lived in. The company is headquartered in South Carolina today; the looms that weave our chambray are in Georgia, where they have always been.

Three families have held this mill in a hundred and eighty-one years. It has been through a war, a fire that took everything, a bankruptcy, and the hundred-year flood of February 1990, when the water climbed the walls and lapped at the warps in the weave room. The mill stood silent for ten days and then went back to work.

In 1994 the Daughters of the Confederacy set a marker on it: Oldest Textile Mill in Northwest Georgia. In 1998 Textile World named it a Model Mill. As its president put it in 2003: “If there is only one denim mill left in this country, we intend it to be this one.”

How our chambray is made

Every hand that touches the cloth can be named — the mill that wove it, the shirtmaker who cut it, and the town each of them sits in.

Drawn from A Place Called Trion: The History of a Southern Cotton Mill, presented to the Chattooga County Historical Society by Scott Thomas, 13 July 2003.